The 1957 Portland Expose is a film noir expose and a very watchable one at that. Edward Binns stars as a family man-tavern owner whom Portland, Oregon mobsters, coveting union control, pressure into a partnership. (The things we can do with your tavern!) But—no surprise—Binns soon has cause to be furious at the mob. The filmmaker is Harold D. Schuster. The screenwriter, Jack DeWitt, requires us to really suspend disbelief near the end of PE. The tavern owner and his teenage daughter (Carolyn Craig) manage to escape the bad guys when they are all together in a section of a warehouse and the bad guys are armed. Before that, however, the movie is sufficiently sophisticated and engaging. It can be seen on YouTube and Tubi.
Author: EarlD Page 2 of 304
The John Sayles-written The Lady in Red (1979) is a tawdry historical fiction about the eventual girlfriend (Pamela Sue Martin) of John Dillinger (Robert Conrad) and how she witnesses his getting shot to death outside a movie theatre and then becomes a one-time bank robber herself. The plot is pathetically bad and no character development for Polly Franklin, the girlfriend, ever obtains. She comes from the sticks but seems utterly suited to the big city. Why?
Sayles inserts a justified, old-style liberalism, or liberal sentiments, into the film, which targets in a big way the aggression of men toward women. Martin is fairly good as Polly but that’s all. (Conrad sleepwalks.) With nice red hair and pretty breasts, she is physically enticing. But, truth to tell, there is too much female nudity in this “feminist” picture. Sayles has nothing to be proud of. The director, Lewis Teague, did better.
Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights is a brilliant novel, even though I have never much explored its meaning, which I perhaps wouldn’t like. The 1970 British cinematic version of it, directed by Robert Fuest, is not very faithful to the book and thus doesn’t yield any real meaning. It’s just a romantic period piece whose Heathcliff (Timothy Dalton) is not the vengeful moral monster of the novel but a pretty enigmatic outsider. However, to be sure, he is not a good man and yet at the end the film glorifies him. A mistake.
Still, I don’t regret seeing Heights. It has some lovely actresses and is attractive-looking. Anna Calder-Marshall, a frequent TV actress, is wholly admirable as Cathy Earnshaw. Judy Cornwell is beautifully persuasive as a maid named Nellie. Certain elements in the film make it plainly more interesting than successful.
“You can’t compare yourself to God.”
“Am I not God’s image in your eyes? Is it not to me that you owe your taste for a certain kind of perfection?”
This exchange of words does not take place except in the imagination of Dr. Paul Courreges, the main figure in the Francois Mauriac novel The Desert of Love (1925), which exchange is between Courreges and the woman he has long been passionate about (and it ain’t his wife): Maria Cross. Doubtless Maria is the kind of woman to see “God’s image” in a man she falls for, but Courreges, it turns out, is not that man. Yet the doctor still loves Maria, whereas she gradually falls for Courreges’s son Raymond. What the novel directs us to is, on the one hand, the deep secularization of French society and, on the other, “the desert of love” one encounters after connections are made with the desired person.
Very little is working out for these characters, and not a one of them adheres, as Mauriac did, to any particular religion. The Desert of Love is very solemn and even tragic, though with Christian overtones. Although God is seldom mentioned in the book, when He is, the references are not only sobering but also encouraging. Example: “There could be no hope for either of them, for father or for son, unless, before they died, He should reveal Himself Who, unknown to them, had drawn and summoned from the depths of their beings this burning, bitter tide.”
To think that God would summon from a person a burning, bitter tide! I was prompted to use the word “encouraging” for a reason.
Cover of The Desert of Love
The France wherein jihadists have slaughtered innocents is the France of the 2008 film, Skirt Day—a scathing picture indeed.
Here, Sonia, a public high school teacher who often wears skirts, is trying to teach a drama course to wild, disrespectful immigrant kids from Muslim backgrounds. (They hate skirts.) Astonished to find that a thuggish African boy has a pistol in his possession, Sonia grabs it and is badly bullied for her trouble. Now in shock—and feeling vindictive—she unintentionally shoots the boy in the leg and takes the students hostage, though only with the aim of delivering this day’s school lesson. A police detective, Labouret, is sent to investigate and remedy the situation. Sonia’s estranged husband, too, arrives at the school, enraged at the principal who has long failed to adequately help Sonia with discipline problems.
The film tells us that Muslim boys have learned to be misogynistic, and even misogynistic criminals. They also use the word “kike.” French society here is choking on its racial-ethnic insanity but, what is more, it witnesses the awful weakening of the institutions of school and marriage—and of French customs. The result is that people feel deracinated and fretful. Labouret, for example, understands that his marriage is at an end. Personal angst is running high.
The director-writer is Jean-Paul Lilienfeld (talented), the actress who plays Sonia is Isabelle Adjani (talented—and superlative here). The film’s climax is not that good, but everything else is dramatically skillful and unspeakably provocative, with a sprinkling of bitter humor. Skirt Day may be the most politically honest and disturbing French artwork since The Camp of the Saints.
(In French with English subtitles)
La journée de la jupe (Photo credit: Wikipedia)